Pakistan Floods Hit 14 Million People as Heat Parches Russia, U.S. Midwest

By Madelene Pearson -
Aug 10, 2010

Pakistan’s deadliest floods that
affected 13.8 million people may sweep through southern areas,
increasing damage to crops and infrastructure. Extreme heat and
smoke from wildfires forced people to flee Moscow.

In China, the death toll from a landslide that buried
villages in the country’s west rose to at least 337, with a
further 1,148 missing. Temperatures in the central U.S. are
forecast to climb back to the 100-degree Fahrenheit (37.7
Celsius) mark this week, and in many areas it will feel much
hotter than that, according to the National Weather Service.

Floods in Pakistan have affected more people than those
displaced in the 2005 Asian Tsunami and the deadly earthquakes
in South Asia and Haiti combined, the United Nations said. The
number of homes destroyed or seriously damaged is 290,000, it
said. The U.N. will issue an appeal for several hundred million
dollars of aid for Pakistan.

“The flood and the devastation caused a very huge human
catastrophe,” Safder Hussain Mehkri, a vice chairman of the
Rice Exporters’ Association of Pakistan, said by phone today.
“We need to rebuild the lives of these people.”

The flooding is “Pakistan’s worst national disaster,”
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said in a televised speech
yesterday. On a tour of Sindh and Punjab, the country’s most
populous provinces and its biggest agricultural zone, Gilani
told reporters that the destruction of roads, bridges and towns
has set Pakistan’s economic development back by years.

Heat, Smoke

In Russia, Moscow set a daily heat record of 35.5 degrees
Celsius yesterday, the seventh such record this month and the
19th of the summer, according to the city’s weather service. The
city reached 38.2 degrees Celsius, the highest ever, on July 29.

The heat and smoke caused the city’s death rate to increase
to about 700 a day from 360 to 380 in normal conditions,
Interfax reported, citing Andrei Seltsovsky, head of the city’s
public health department. Carbon monoxide and particulate matter
suspended in Moscow’s air is at least twice acceptable levels,
Yelena Lezina, a spokeswoman for the state environmental
monitoring agency, told Rossiya 24.

The nation’s worst drought in half a century has forced the
government to declare states of emergency in 28-crop producing
regions. Grain exports from the nation have been banned until
the end of the year as crops wither, helping spur prices of
wheat to a 23-month high on Aug. 6.

In the U.S. Midwest, excessive heat warnings were issued
for nine states along the Mississippi River and a heat advisory
covers parts of seven more, the weather service said yesterday.
It’s the latest heat wave of a Northern Hemisphere summer that
shattered records. The heat affecting Russia has gripped Ukraine
and Belarus, where records were also set, said Jeff Masters, co-
founder of Weather Underground in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In China, more than 10,000 soldiers, police and
firefighters are searching for survivors in Zhouqu county,
located in an ethnic Tibetan prefecture of western China’s Gansu
province after a landslide struck late Aug. 7, the official
Xinhua News Agency reported.

Heavy rains are forecast for portions of southern Gansu
today and tomorrow, the China Meteorological Administration said
on its website. In addition to Gansu, downpours may also hit
portions of the neighboring provinces of Ningxia, Shaanxi,
Qinghai and Sichuan, the weather agency said.

Flooding caused by heavy rain has killed more than 1,450
people throughout China this year as of Aug. 6, the deadliest in
more than a decade, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.